M.A. / This study was prompted by the thousands of frustrated interracial couples who were either compelled to hide their relationships or leave South Africa in order to get married or live where interracial relationships and marriages were permitted. This pattern occurred during the apartheid era, before the repeal of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and Section 16 of the Immorality Act. After the repeal of these Acts, the number of interracial couples in South Africa increased as indicated by Central Statistical Service figures for 1990, when 3 212 interracial marriages were reported. In April 1994 South Africa gained its first Democratic Government leading to the investigator being encouraged to undertake this study. In the study, the investigator explored patterns of family interaction in South African interracial marriages. Eight married couples were interviewed for between 45 minutes to one hour each, and the interviews were taperecorded. Three raters were used by the investigator to score the taped interviews. Couples seemed to feel that more than any other factor, they had become involved because they loved each other. They seemed to have developed their own style of communication since both verbal and non-verbal acts were seldom misinterpreted by them. Given the past political situation in South Africa, these couples seemed to have developed a closer bond. On the other hand, these couples exhibited the fact that interracial marriages are in most respects like other marriages in terms of their dynamics Three male adolescent children of the interracial couples were also asked to comp) .-,e the Family Functioning in Adolescence Questionnaire. Two adolescents identified with tl -,.. value systems of their parents, while one adolescent disagreed with his parents' value system.

The purpose of this study was to show support that certain cultural characteristics of an individual could be identified based on the region where that individual was born and raised. These cultural characteristics were identified and defined, and strategies on understanding these cultural characteristics were reviewed. This study revealed that by focusing on this understanding, trust can be established quickly and it is this trust that is the basis of building any type of relationship. Several different macrocultural systems were examined in this study. These included the United States, Asia, Central and South America, India, the Middle East, and the European Union cultures. These are the largest and the fastest growing regions of the world as well as the locations where most of the newly established business relationships are being formed. / The study examined each macrocultural system individually by giving some background information on the culture and reasons for their recent explosive economic growth. Upon review of this study, any individual should be able to approach others with the realization that, with some degree of confidence, cultural characteristics of the individual being pursued can be predetermined based on a number of factors. The ability to recognize these factors facilitates a cultural competency that includes the skills and qualities that enable successful outcomes to happen in business contexts where different cultures are interacting. This predetermination will provide a type of blueprint to an individual's thoughts, tendencies, and even buying patterns. / These strategies will reveal ways of sidestepping everyone's natural tendency to say "no." By providing this insight into predisposed behavior patterns, most individuals will tend to lower their natural defense barriers and a smooth and effective conversation will follow. Personality types are recognized during or after a conversation, but cultural characteristics can be determined prior to the start of any conversation. Oftentimes, it is too late to try and figure out a personality type to adjust your sales approach or strategy in the middle of a conversation. There are ways to recognize cultural characteristics and incorporate certain strategies simply by knowing where a prospect was born and raised, as well as knowing their ethnicity. / by Walter N. Burton III. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web. FboU

The number of American undergraduate students participating in study abroad programs is increasing annually. Educators, questioning the quality and impact of students’ learning and their inability to articulate experiences while abroad, have looked to improve intercultural communication. Reflection is frequently recommended as a pedagogical tool to help students examine and connect their experiences to larger ideas of culture, society, and globalization. However, there are few examples in research literature of study abroad students’ written reflection to different audiences and in digital contexts. This study explored how undergraduate students wrote about their study abroad experiences in a digitally mediated, pedagogical context with young American audiences from underserved backgrounds. It inquired how pedagogically-oriented curriculum did or did not support students’ intercultural learning and processes of reflection. Through document analysis and a qualitative survey of 30 students, and interviews with seven key informants, the study analyzed the products and processes of reflection and writing. The study found that the undergraduate sojourners represented themselves as travelers who had overcome institutional and socioeconomic barriers in order to pursue their academic and personal goals. Participants wrote about warmth, belonging, and their experiences of receptivity by local people and expressed openness and motivation to write for an authentic audience. A minority of the students wrote from a self-interrogative, implicative perspective where they considered ideas of privilege and critically examined cultural norms. Similarly, a small number questioned the content of the curriculum and tone of their writing, perhaps because of the curricular constraints and presentation of the positive benefits of learning through travel. Overall, the structure of the curriculum facilitated students’ communication as thoughtful citizens not just of their local communities, but also of the world, as they considered their audiences, their position as American travelers, and their relationships with local people. The study supports structured and free-form writing to authentic audiences as a tool for cultivating reflection, exploring identity, and making global and local connections in study abroad contexts. It urges educators to reflect on the goals and conditions for cultivating openness to locals and distant audiences and critical awareness of one’s cultural and social identity.

Abstract is available to download.

Language students must learn to communicate effectively in cross-cultural settings, avoiding unwitting violations of culturally determined norms of behavior. This study compares German learners of English ( GEs) with native speakers of English ( AEs) and German (GGs), studying pragmatic transfer associated with the face-threatening speech act of refusal. Data elicitation involved a written role-play questionnaire composed of twelve refusal situations, including four refusal stimulus types (requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions) and interlocutors of higher, lower, and equal status. Response strategies were identified and classified, and the three groups were compared in terms of frequency and content of strategies chosen. Overall, the findings suggest that the AEs strove for friction-free interactions, while the German subjects tended to be candid. The AEs opted for inoffensive, routinized responses, emphasizing face-protection, and eschewing expressions of unwillingness. The AEs generally provided only vague excuses, relying extensively on positive forms aimed at preserving rapport. Social distance affected AE levels of politeness. By contrast, GG response patterns were situation-specific. Toward unjustified requests or unwelcome suggestions, the GGs exhibited directness, outspokenness with critical remarks, and willingness to risk confrontation, regardless of relative status. In more neutral situations, status and social distance influenced levels of politeness. The GEs appeared to assess situational factors in much the same way as the GGs; however, GE responses were consistently more tempered. Both groups of Germans were more open with expressions of unwillingness than the AEs. They tended to provide solid justification for refusals, while maintaining a more aloof stance. When there was no cause for irritation, the GEs recognized the need for greater tactfulness in English (probably responding according to explicit teaching). When aggravated, however, they lapsed into pragmatic patterns of their native language, following their "gut reactions." Sometimes GE efforts to exceed German native speaker levels of politeness led to "hyper-correction" (i.e., going beyond the AEs' degree of politeness).Occasionally, the GEs transferred German native speaker strategies for increasing politeness. In situations of potential conflict, the GEs might startle native speakers with unexpected candor, the shock exacerbated by cultural proximity and the GEs' near approach of native speaker norms on other levels.

Guanxi literally means a �special personal relationship� in Chinese social and business life. It is commonly considered a cultural barrier for many foreign entrants in China due to its exclusiveness, complexity and dynamics. This research study aims to understand the constraints and dilemmas in Chinese-Western intercultural business contexts. Specific questions addressed in this study are: (a) What are the constraints and dilemmas in Chinese-Western intercultural relationships in marketing? (b) How do business actors manage these constraints and dilemmas? (c) What new insights can be developed in order to improve Chinese-Western intercultural marketing relationships? These questions are important because most theoretical understandings of business relationships are developed in Western contexts. Furthermore, the emergence of China as a major global trading nation gives weight to these questions. A case study strategy is adopted with a focus on Chinese-Western intercultural marketing relationships. This study follows the International/Industrial Marketing & Purchasing Group (IMP)�s research tradition that views relationship building as the consequence of interaction among networks of actors. The research methodology is both qualitative and interpretive. A hermeneutical approach under the constructivist paradigm is adopted to interpret empirical findings from interviews with 58 Chinese and Western business managers. Analysis was conducted in three hermeneutical stages. Each stage progressed and revealed new sources of understanding. The first stage provided a contextual understanding of Chinese-Western intercultural business relationship by identifying �three circles� of relationship development activity based on behavioural norms, respectively the insider (guanxi) circle, an emerging intercultural circle and an outsider circle. This allowed me to develop a bridging perspective of guanxi ties in the emerging intercultural �middle� circle. The second stage revealed three types of guanxi dilemmas for outsiders. The second stage also disclosed seven kinds of perceived risk derived from Confucian ideology. The third stage developed a new concept of guanxi gatekeeper. These guanxi gatekeepers play vital roles in managing outsiders� dilemmas and the risks perceived by insiders in developing intercultural (interpersonal) relationships. They engage two gatekeeping processes: reciprocal gatekeeping and symbolic gatekeeping. It is my conclusion that the gatekeeping view of guanxi processes provides an improved understanding of relationship development in Chinese-Western intercultural business contexts. This study contributes to the marketing literature by identifying a new interpersonal network perspective and also the network position of guanxi gatekeeper in emerging Chinese-Western intercultural business networks. Thus, indirectly connected actors are seen to work independently but also interdependently through the involvement of gatekeepers. This study has an important strategic implication for Western entrants in China: Western firms and managers can avoid la guanxi (forcing direct relationships with innermost guanxi insiders) and instead operate through the facilitation of a middle force - guanxi gatekeepers.

ABSTRACT Cultural beliefs and values implicitly shape every aspect of the way we parent our children and how we communicate about parenting. For parents who are migrants and experiencing parenting in a new country it is essential that child and family health professionals better understand how the cultural self influences practice. Child and family health professionals work with families who come from cultures other than their own on a daily basis. How they communicate with these families is the subject of this ethnographic study into culture and communication in child and family health. Taking culture as its starting point this study explored the everyday communication experiences of child health professionals including child and family health nurses, social workers and doctors in a statewide child and family health service in South Australia. Data included participant observation, video and in-depth interview data. Drawing on insights from cultural studies including postcolonial and feminist scholarship the analysis showed that child health professionals attempted to use contemporary discourses of service provision such as partnership with enthusiasm and with genuine intent. However their application of partnership was limited by unexamined binary constructs within dominant pedagogic tools of culture and communication. Analysis showed that four key binaries structured the communication practice of participants in this study; public or private knowledge, ideologies of sameness or difference, organisational or professional philosophies of practice and the expert or partner in intercultural communication. Three body analysis is introduced as a strategy to work with these binary challenges that seem to present when practice attempts to incorporate theory without consideration of the contexts of use. The combination of postcolonial feminist critique and three body analysis stimulates an explicit examination of health care inequalities as they intersect with the ongoing effects of colonisation. Current professional strategies for working with people who are new arrivals or migrants to Australia focus on understanding differences associated with particular ethic and cultural groups. Despite much work being undertaken to understand difference, in practice this culturalist approach underpinned by a belief in the essential nature of human kind, has resulted in people who are migrants or new arrivals continuing to report poor communication by health professionals as a primary barrier to their health care. Theoretical analysis suggests that this approach ignores differences in power relations among ethnic groups and ultimately manifests in racism. Further, contemporary communication pedagogies in child and family health reinforce this inattention to relations of power when health professionals are instructed to communicate in ways that are regardless of difference. By advocating that people are treated the same, historic and situated issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities are ignored. In this way binaries of sameness/difference are perpetuated. Those parents located in marginalised positions of difference experience inequities in health care. In this study, child and family health professionals frequently drew from their own personal experiences of parenting to determine the content of information given to new parents, and to inform their approach to intercultural communication. In doing so they unselfconsciously conflated their personal and professional pedagogies and presented all information as professional. Child and family health practices are deeply cultured. Many practices are not scientifically proven and as such do not fit comfortably with the rational scientific medical paradigm with which they are aligned. Where disciplinary knowledge can be assessed and evaluated, this study found that there was no equivalent place for the evaluation of understanding of cultural knowledge — it was assumed as universal. Deeply cultured personal information tendered by participants represents a normative world that is white, western, middle class and gendered. Participants did not recognise themselves as cultured, nor did they recognise the potential impact of bringing this unexamined cultural self into the professional encounter. This resulted in seepage of practice that was democratically racist. This is where outward commitments to justice equality and fairness paradoxically exist with conflicting personal ideologies of sameness. Challenged to find a place for these constructs to coexist participants outwardly identify with the organisationally preferred position of social justice or evidence-based practice. However, participant observation and discussion of practice demonstrated that when conflicting personal beliefs and values were left unattended they found ways of surreptitiously creeping into and shaping the consultation. It seems that modernist theories do not provide adequate ontological and epistemological understandings for working with, and valuing pluralism in multiculture. Rather they constrict and limit practice which leads to an unrecognised perpetuation of colonising agendas in child and family health. Findings from this study contribute to the growing need to find ways to work with and unsettle existing binaries of communication and culture. The methods also suggest ways forward to support change in practice leading to professional development that is mindful and regardful of plurality in culture and communication. Interweaving three body analyses with postcolonial feminism offers a decolonising strategy for application in the multiculture that is Australia. Due to the spatial and temporal spaces created by using three bodies alongside postcolonial feminism, this combination becomes a tangible approach to deconstruction, for child and family health professionals that is both theoretical and practical.

This thesis is concerned with cross-cultural consulting. The research examines how a multinational consulting team worked with a multinational client. The consultants were from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, USA and Australia and the client was a multinational oil company located on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. The study employs the narrative theory of Ricoeur together with the research findings on culture of Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall, Kluckhorn and Strodtbeck. The study relies on a comparison of national cultural characteristics as they were enacted duringthe conduct of a consulting project. The research emphasises the roles of the consultants, the consulting process and the consulting outcomes.

This thesis is a comparative study of the West�s intellectual responses to the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand from the period of first contact through until 1850. The thesis does not attempt a comprehensive history of the West�s encounters with Australasia nor does it attempt to discuss the role of the indigene within these encounters. The thesis does, however, discuss the formulation and expression of those intellectual traditions that informed the Western response to the Maori and Aborigine. Specifically, each chapter addresses a particular aspect of the West�s interaction with the indigenous peoples of Australasia in order demonstrate how the Western narratives of exploration, travel and settlement were informed by the wider discourse of colonialism. Amongst some of the themes addressed in the course of this thesis are: the ideal of the �Good Savage�, the shifting notion of a �Great Chain of Being�, the rise of natural history as a system for classifying human difference and the importance of ideas of savagery in framing the colonial response to the Maori and Aborigine were characterised by similarities and continuities as much as by the more commonly acknowledged differences and discontinuities.

With the change in the economic structures of Western industrialised countries and the shift of traditional industries towards knowledge and services in recent decades the challenge to stay competitive in increasingly globalised culturally diverse markets continues to be a priority for organisations. Of central importance is the need to acknowledge, utilise and share the diversity of employees' knowledge, particularly tacit knowledge that is ethnically influenced, a resource that is enormously rich yet overlooked, undervalued and under-utilised in the employment market. This PhD dissertation focuses on the implications of the knowledge era for how organisations manage their culturally diverse workforce. The purpose of the research is to explore the organisational strategies required for Australian businesses to support and encourage the development and sharing of knowledge between employees of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Arising from an extensive review of the literature on both Diversity and Knowledge Management, a framework for a holistic Diversity Knowledge Management/Sharing (D-KM/S) Strategy was developed. This framework identified the need for organisations to develop a productive diversity management model that consists of a number of elements including a two-way communication strategy, training in cultural intelligence (CQ) and the development of opportunities for social networking through Communities of Practice. A four-phased process for the organisational journey towards a holistic D-KM/S Strategy was proposed. An initial audit of several Australian organisations recognised for their award-winning diversity management strategies confirmed the validity of this framework. The framework was then used to underpin the qualitative interpretive case study of three of the organisations that had been part of the initial audit to determine to what extent these organisations had succeeded in progressing through these phases towards the final holistic D-KM/S Strategy. In so doing, the candidate also focused on the role of the Human Resources Department (traditionally responsible for implementing diversity policy within organisations) in implementing a more holistic approach. From a comparison of the findings from the primary research the candidate concluded that while each organisation had progressed through several of the phases towards a holistic D-KM/S Strategy, they differed in their progress and none had as yet achieved the final phase. The study did identify two additional elements that require further research which relate to the potential of Information Technology to provide opportunities for social networking, and the potential of 'narrative' to be used to share culturally influenced stories. The research concludes that the organisational strategies required for Australian businesses to support and encourage the development and sharing of knowledge between employees of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds includes: first, a productive diversity strategy that acknowledges both the explicit and tacit knowledge that a multicultural workforce brings to an organisation; and, second, processes that embed two-way communication opportunities for employees and managers, training in CQ for an increased number of managers and employees, greater support for social networking opportunities through Communities of Practice (supported by Information Technology tools), and encouragement of opportunities for employees to share cultural narratives. In addition, the thesis proposed an increased role for the Human Resources Department (working closely with line managers) in the achievement of a holistic D-KM/S Strategy.